Microsoft Reverses Decision, Employees Will Still Get a Free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (theverge.com) 86
UPDATE (6/4/2023): Microsoft has changed its mind, the Verge reported Friday, and now will continue giving a free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to most of its 238,000 employees, according to an announcement from Xbox chief Phil Spencer.
Earlier reports had suggested that Microsoft was removing the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit — and some employees weren't happy about it. From the Verge's earlier report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company started informing employees this week that in January 2024 the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit for permanent Microsoft employees will no longer be available. I understand that Xbox employees will continue to keep the benefit, but the vast majority of Microsoft employees who aren't part of Xbox / Microsoft Gaming will see the benefit disappear next year.
Microsoft employees will be able to purchase a discounted 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Subscription at the company's internal store. Some Microsoft employees have taken to the company's internal messaging platform to voice their objections about the benefit being removed. The employee posts even prompted Xbox chief Phil Spencer to respond, noting that he wasn't aware of the changes and is looking into the situation.
Earlier reports had suggested that Microsoft was removing the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit — and some employees weren't happy about it. From the Verge's earlier report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company started informing employees this week that in January 2024 the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit for permanent Microsoft employees will no longer be available. I understand that Xbox employees will continue to keep the benefit, but the vast majority of Microsoft employees who aren't part of Xbox / Microsoft Gaming will see the benefit disappear next year.
Microsoft employees will be able to purchase a discounted 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Subscription at the company's internal store. Some Microsoft employees have taken to the company's internal messaging platform to voice their objections about the benefit being removed. The employee posts even prompted Xbox chief Phil Spencer to respond, noting that he wasn't aware of the changes and is looking into the situation.
I mean it makes since (Score:4, Interesting)
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The employee posts even prompted Xbox chief Phil Spencer to respond, noting that he wasn't aware of the changes and is looking into the situation.
According to Wackypedia: "Phil Spencer is the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. He is currently the head of the Xbox brand and leads the global creative and engineering teams responsible for gaming at Microsoft."
And yet, somehow, he is "not aware" of this change and is "looking into it".
On the positive side, he gets paid $10 million a year to not know what is going on in the department that he is supposed to be running.
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You are correct. There are two more concerns I'd have. First is if they're happy about playing then when issues crop up they can whisper to the right ppl to get them addressed. Example: "Man... seems like no matter what lobby I'm on some asshole's got their mic on and their smoke detector battery needs changing. Any chance we can filter that chirp?" The second is now these disgruntled employees have a lot less motivation to be honorable players. Would it be hugely surprising if some of these peeps
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They spend $x per month on the licenses for the game, they have y employees that will be irritated by the lose, and saving that $x dollars will get me below budget and a high score on my end of year reports, resulting in $z bonus for me.
Maybe they should change the name to "XYZ-Box"? ;-)
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Why would the head of gaming want to know if a sizable portion of their userbase is about to join their gaming network while disgruntled? Mainly for the lols, I'd imagine.
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How sizeable? It's not like every Microsoft employee made use of this, but even if every single employee actively used Game Pass, the numbers would still be only a tiny blip in the stats. Since not all employees use it, the actual cost to Microsoft would probably be in the $5/month or less range.
Maybe the cut off Game Pass in the hopes that employees would spend more time and work to improve their crappy products?
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Maybe the cut off Game Pass in the hopes that employees would spend more time and work to improve their crappy products?
Microsoft spends effort to "improve their crappy products"? In my experience they seem to go to a good deal of trouble to make them even worse.
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True, but it takes a lot of effort to really make it this bad. Slacker employees would cause only mediocre products.
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And yet, somehow, he is "not aware" of this change and is "looking into it".
Isn't it funny? We would all be fired, if we pulled that bs. This ass clown is openly incompetent and a liar. All he needs is to bankrupt a casino and he could be US president.
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How you know a company is failing:
- They don't have 24/7 hours
- They don't have 27/7 cafeteria for their staff AND outsourcers
- They don't have a break room
- They cut absurd benefits, this can range from free soda in the vending machine to free coffee/tea in the break room.
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- They don't have 24/7 hours
- They don't have 27/7 cafeteria for their staff AND outsourcers
Uhhh what? Why would you have a24/7 hours and 24/7 cafeteria? Just go home at 5 or whatever.
He's a right wing troll (Score:1)
It goes all the way back to the French Revolution when the Monarchists sat in the right wing of the legislature. The key characteristic of the right wing is complete deference to authority. So they get miffed when it's questioned and (awkwar
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Authoritarianism is not a right or left concept. Both wings have authoritarianism.
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Indeed. Basically all right wing people are authoritarians. Makes them bad people and a force of destruction. Most are too mentally limited to figure that out though.
Missing from your list (Score:1)
That seems shortsighted (Score:2)
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I would like to know what the justification was to removing a company perk like this. This move would discourage loyalty. It would be one thing if it did not exist before and they never offered the perk but to remove it without an explanation will make employees unhappy.
Exactly. Loss aversion will make the response stronger than the actual value to the employee; even though it is a taxable benefit and thus not fully "free." I suspect even some of the ones who never used it will be upset. It boggles my mind that they would do such a thing, especially when the actual cost to the is zero.
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The cost isn't zero, this perk does cost them money. The venn diagram of "people who work at Microsoft" and "people who would pay for the best game service" aren't two circles, there is going to be significant overlap.
I agree that this isn't a good idea. If only for the bad press.
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That isn't even the limit of the cost. You still need the servers for the employees getting the free service.
On the other hand, I could probably play it as less "perk" and more "test group" for tax purposes. Basically, give the employees an elevated ability to report bugs and outages and such.
Basically, by tying it to "quality control" or "product awareness" or such, you take it from a perk/benefit to a extra duty.
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The cost isn't zero, this perk does cost them money. The venn diagram of "people who work at Microsoft" and "people who would pay for the best game service" aren't two circles, there is going to be significant overlap.
I agree that this isn't a good idea. If only for the bad press.
I agree that the actual cost to Microsoft isn't zero, but it can't be very significant on a per employee basis. Also, I have to wonder if anyone actually did an analysis comparing number of employees that are eligible for this perk against number of employees that actually use it on a regular basis (not including the X-Box teams because they are keeping the perk) to try and gauge how many potentially pissed off employees they would have, or if some savings pillar group said we could get X 'extra' revenue i
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The silliness of this makes me think there was something more significant / interesting in the background, like someone was caught reselling / sharing the GP account.
I could see Susan the secretary shared her MS account credentials with her nephew or something to give him Gamepass, but then now he can access the company slack (err teams?) or confidential things.
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The cost isn't zero, this perk does cost them money. The venn diagram of "people who work at Microsoft" and "people who would pay for the best game service" aren't two circles, there is going to be significant overlap.
I agree that this isn't a good idea. If only for the bad press.
I agree it's not zero, and probably should have said the marginal costs are near zero; however considering it has some 120 million subscribers and MS has what, 300K employees, I doubt the cost is anything but a rounding error.
At any rate, their actual cost vs the impact on employees is likely much less for the former than the latter.
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He's technically right [cornell.edu], this could fall under "employee discount" and since the discount is >20% the excess (80%) would be considered taxable. That said, I kinda doubt Microsoft's HR/Finance beancounters are OCD enough to account for this. It's not something the IRS generally concerns itself with until you get into "real" money, e.g., Trump's accountant not claiming taxes on a high priced rent free apartment overlooking Central Park.
XBox Game Pass Ultimate is $16.99/mo, 80% of that is $13.59, so ove
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It's not something the IRS generally concerns itself with until you get into "real" money
I think the IRS would ignore it, but not because it's not enough money. The IRS limit on corporate gifts to employees is $25 per year, beyond that the are income and have to be taxed, and they are pretty sticky about it. The XBox Ultimate Pass is $200 per year, so if that counts as a corporate gift (or paid benefit, etc.), the IRS would definitely care. 238k employees, supposing an average tax bracket of 30%, that would mean $14.5M in taxes due.
But in this case, Microsoft can easily avoid accounting for i
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Translation: someone internally in Microsoft decided to inter-division chargeback the cost of the perk, so they eliminate it to avoid the chargeback. Phil Spencer probably really did have no idea.
Microsoft's benefits are rather rich. The ludicrously small incremental cost probably didn't do anyone harm. They give free MSDN subscriptions to the employees, which cost far more, as they include free Azure consumption.
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There is no need to work for a large company. In fact it may be preferable to not do that. Of course, the smaller the company you work for, the more real your claimed skills need to be.
Yikes (Score:2)
> informing employees this week that in January 2024 the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit for permanent Microsoft employees will no longer be available.
Is Microsoft that hurt for cash or subscriber numbers they need to pull this?
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Why are they punishing employees? (Score:2)
They're taking away a benefit that costs them effectively nothing, for basically no other reason than to try to claw back some of their employee's salaries as revenue. It's not like Microsoft is actually hurting for money, this is just a blatant cash grab because they can.
Greed is out of control.
$17/month (Score:2)
That's all it costs. Yeah it's kinda lame but it's better to focus on bigger things like . . . when's my next pay raise? Plus apparently they can buy at a discount. Of course the opposite is also true: it costs MS virtually nothing to offer this service for free to its own employees. Removing it as a perk is petty and useless.
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Why would you think it costs them nothing? They have to license the overwhelming majority of the content from non-Microsoft publishers, and those publishers are unlikely to agree to give freebies to Microsoft's employees.
As was mentioned earlier in another post, the accounts are probably internally charged to department overhead and some pointy head decided they didn't like sending a bunch of money every month to the Xbox gaming division and made a stink.
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Bingo, "virtually nothing" rather than "absolutely nothing". MS has department budgets in the millions of dollars. $17/month retail (and less than that for employees) is less than what it costs them to keep coffee in the break room.
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Reminds me of when Credit Suisse cancelled the free coffee for employees. That was probably the beginning of the end...
Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
What a shit thing to do! It's not like it's a real cost. Are they expecting their employees to just say "oh well, I guess I have to pay my employer for the privilege of playing their games now." That's just awful for morale and dogfooding.
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Most of the Game Pass games are not Microsoft games but rather licensed content. Microsoft used to provide not-for-resale while sleeve versions of their games to employees (I had a huge stack and I think the only one I ever played was Age of Empires) and probably still do, but they wouldn't be able to pass out copies of other companies products for free.
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Even at full retail price Gamepass Ultimate costs 70 bucks per year. In the overall scheme of compensation for a Microsoft employee it's a rounding error.
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The cost of Game Pass Ultimate is $17/month. That's $204 per year. Probably the yearly subscription fee is less. And that's the price you and I pay as norma
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What a shit thing to do! It's not like it's a real cost.
I doubt that it's not a real cost. Microsoft has to pay licensing fees to the makers of the games included in the pass, and I'd expect those fees to scale with the number of passes.
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Does anyone know how these actually work? I always assumed they just pay a flat fee to each publisher for each aging shovelware title they add to the library, maybe more if they add an older AAA title. Do they actually pay per activation?
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It's not like it's a real cost.
Of course it's a real cost. It's a far lower cost than the sticker price, but a cost none the less. I suspect they will use the piracy argument of it being a lost sale. Since you can't sue your customers anymore maybe you can claw back some freebies you give out instead.
Why take this away? (Score:2)
The infrastructure is already there so adding a few thousand "free" accounts can't really cost Microsoft anything but it is a tangible perk for the employee. If they are going have to pony up for an online game subscription, there are plenty of alternatives the employees can migrate to...
Of Course (Score:1)
Microsoft only makes $547 million a day. Gotta save those pennies and dimes you know.
By the way, I've heard ruthless and cruel layoffs around the holidays beef up that bottom line too. Disney has quite a bit of experience if you need help.
Assholes.
If an employee complains, (Score:1)
...MS will make them use Windows 11.
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I liked windows 3.11 a lot, 11 can't be that bad.
Keep your employees playing Microsoft (Score:2)
If they stop playing, they might reflect on where their career went south.
PC Master Race Strikes Again. (Score:1, Flamebait)
What are grown adults doing playing kiddie games? You work for MS. Play games on a real computer.
I think this is great. They can see who is crying then fire them since they still play kiddie games and are possible child molesters.
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XBox game pass also covers PC games.
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/xbo... [xbox.com]
Play hundreds of high-quality games solo or with friends on console, PC, or cloud. There’s always something new to play with Ultimate.
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What are grown adults doing playing kiddie games? You work for MS. Play games on a real computer.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate works for PC too.
They can see who is crying then fire them since they still play kiddie games and are possible child molesters.
So you want MS to fire their employees for playing games on Xbox consoles and Windows? Is that your logic?
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A stealth pay cut? (Score:2)
So every MS employee that used it got a $15.00 a month pay cut..
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Depends whether it was written into their employment contract or not. You can call it a pay cut, but it was probably just a nice perk without contractual backing. It's no more a pay cut than if they take the coffee pot out of the break room.
fire them (Score:2)
End result? (Score:3)
The end result will be that a few MS employees who casually used the service will stop using it and effectively become less familiar with their company's offerings, be less connected with the overall mission, and have a little less reason to be loyal. All that for $17/month retail, or likely $2/month MS costs.
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I would be really, really surprised to hear that the subscription was they way that employees became familiar with the company's offerings.
If you needed the free sub to learn about it, you aren't doing anything for which knowing about it matters.
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and effectively become less familiar with their company's offerings, be less connected with the overall mission,
No they won't. Only employees outside of the division related to that offering are losing the benefit. There's no point in an Office 365 programmer or a Cloud engineer being intimately familiar with Xbox game pass providing games that aren't made by Microsoft.
It's a dick move, but it won't negatively affect the company's internal knowledge in any relevant way.
Anti-number inflation? (Score:1)
It also could be a response to accusations that they are inflating thier subscriber numbers. This kicks off 250K "subscribers" that they counted in their numbers, but never get fees for.
Wonder if they'll flipflop (Score:2)
Might simply be that some exec was obliged to look at cost cutting measures and suggested it expecting it to veto'ed since it'd undermine general staff familiarity with their own product range and some overseer exec figured it was safe to go ahead with because it wasn't their idea so their ass is covered. Neither would be eager to continue if there's any blow up.
Frankly Sony should just make a limited time offer of a free Playstatation Whatever Service for whatever duration just to get the photo ops of the
Ha, it can't even cost anything! (Score:2)
Cory summed this up well. (Score:2)
Shitification. Oddly, on employees, but ok, that's the next step in shitification.
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Indeed. Microsoft never managed to get on a good path and now they are going down the bad one faster.
Don't worry (Score:2)
Most of you won't be Microsoft employees soon.
Phil Spencer reinstated the benefit (Score:2)
Old new - Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, reinstated the benefit for all Microsoft employees.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/... [theverge.com]